That's odd. I've never seen my computer use more than a few kilobytes of swap ever (on Linux that is), and I have 4 GB of RAM. Have you modified your scheduler before? By default, it shouldn't be swapping out memory unless you haven't used it in a long time and the memory would be better spent on the filesystem cache (so, not very often).

It depends on the situation etc. This is a common fix/tweak a lot of people end up doing, because -- especially on a game like TF2 where it might be minutes between loads -- the OS may well think the memory unused(as it hasn't been touched in minutes), yet we really /do/ care about it.Whether cached files or swapping out unused ram is better really depends on the applications you want to run. On a server, the default is probably good enough. On a desktop, we don't want to be waiting(period), so I'd say it should be set to a fairly low value.

Ah, okay. It makes sense that it might swap it during loading. It shouldn't make any noticeable difference though, since it should stay in memory after the load is done. It's not like it's thrashing or anything.

Still, that's not a bad tip in general.

You can also disable swap entirely with

sudo swapoff -a

(and reenable it with swapon). A word of warning though: this may cause a kernel panic if you, for some reason, need more RAM at once than you have available. That shouldn't be a problem though if you have at least 4 GB.